Public Relations Review 41 (2015) 138–140 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Public Relations Review Research in Brief Political social media engagement: Comparing campaign goals with voter behavior  Elizabeth Housholder a , Heather L. LaMarre b,* a University of Minnesota, United States b Temple University, United States a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 7 August 2013 Received in revised form 22 October 2014 Accepted 30 October 2014 Keywords: Political public relations Social media Political communication Secondary analysis Pew a b s t r a c t This study combines campaign interviews with secondary analysis of Pew data from the 2010 U.S. election to examine both social media expectations from the campaign side and fulfillment of those expectations from the public side. The results indicate that engage- ment with a campaign on social media dramatically increases the likelihood of voters’ engagement in key political participation outcomes. © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction and theory In today’s new media environment, publics are increasingly connecting with political groups through new media tech- nologies (Sweetser, 2011), while social media have been touted as a mechanism for engaging key stakeholder groups, disseminating campaign messages and increasing candidate support (LaMarre & Suzuki-Holbrecht, 2013). Yet little work to date has examined whether political campaigns are able to use social media to effectively meet their goals and what role engagement with a campaign plays in the voting process (Housholder & LaMarre, 2014). The potential for social media to enhance, support, and even motivate engagement in the political process is generating excitement among political elites. That said, the participatory effects in studies of voters’ social media engagement are not clear. Some scholars have shown that social networking positively predicted traditional offline engagement such as voting (Bakker & de Vreese, 2011), as well as increased donations and fundraising (Vitak et al., 2011). On the contrary, other scholars have shown that more traditional political variables (such as knowledge or interest) are better predictors of political participation (Quintelier & Vissers, 2008) and that social networking use is not related to increased political participation (Baumgartner & Morris, 2010). However, these past studies examine normatively desirable outcomes (i.e. increased mobilization) without consideration of what goals campaigns hope to achieve through social media engagement. This study extends the previous work in this area by linking stated campaign goals with actual voter outcomes through comparing political campaigns’ stated goals for social media to Pew data of voters’ political social media use.  Note: This research was funded by The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Emerging Scholars Grant. Please direct all questions regarding this research to the Principal Investigator, Heather L. LaMarre, Ph.D. * Corresponding author at: 220 Weiss Hall, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, United States. Tel.: +12152045790. E-mail addresses: gesk0034@umn.edu (E. Housholder), heather.lamarre@temple.edu (H.L. LaMarre). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2014.10.007 0363-8111/© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.